After a glorious Easter, winter returned to the Highlands last week with blizzards and hailstorms interspersed by short bursts of sunshine. ‘Typical lambing weather,’ they told me up in the Strath of Kildonan, where the lambing season had just begun.
We woke to a white landscape, although it didn’t deter the fishermen, who were soon out in full force on the Helmsdale. But out at Altanduin, five miles from the road, it’s a different picture. The shepherdess, working there alone on the remote hirsel, has been lifting dead lambs frozen to the ground in their own amniotic fluid.
Back at home, the Black Isle has adopted the white-and-yellow livery of the Vatican flag. The snowline on Wyvis, which I can monitor from my desk, has dropped right back down again, leaving the ben and surrounding hills a dazzle of marble against the cacophony of golds: daffodils (still far from dead), whins (gorse) ablaze, fields of ripening rape and the SNP posters fluttering from every lamppost.
Down below, I can count no less than seven oil rigs anchored in the Cromarty Firth. Be warned, Nicola Sturgeon: the gold’s in the landscape right now, not the oil industry.
Spectator: A case of mistaken identity
Lucy Baring almost loses Fletcher.
Town mouse considers the move to Putney
Town mouse watches his friends move house.
-
Can't you hear me S.O.S? Our treasured native dog breeds are at risk of extinctionDo you know your Kerry blue terrier from your Lancashire heeler? A simple lack of publicity is often to blame for some of the UK's native dog breeds flying dangerously low under-the-radar.
-
'There are architects and architects, but only one ARCHITECT': Sir Edwin Lutyens and the wartime Chancellor who helped launch his stellar careerClive Aslet explores the relationship between Sir Edwin Lutyens and perhaps his most important private client, the politician and financier Reginald McKenna.
